Self-reporting: David Carr, a media columnist for The New York Times, is the author of The Night of the Gun.

SUMMER BOOKS PREVIEW

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEW YORK  David Carr, the author, journalist and former crack addict, arrives for an interview armed only with iced coffee and a pack of Camels.

The topic is his memoir about the wreckage that Carr, 51, made of his younger life. It's titled The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life — His Own (Simon & Schuster, $26).

In 1987, high on cocaine and alcohol, after being fired from a reporting job in Minneapolis, Carr got into an argument with his best friend and pulled a gun — or, at least that's what Carr's own reporting shows.

Until he began working on his book, Carr says, his memory was different: that his friend pointed the gun at Carr.

"Memories are like that," he says, especially for addicts.

After "going on and off the wagon as much as a stagecoach driver," Carr says, his addictions are caffeine and nicotine.

He's trying to quit smoking. He says that his mother died of lung cancer but that his best writing for the memoir was fueled by coffee and cigarettes at 3 a.m.

Carr delights in contradictions, even at his own expense.

His book asks readers: "If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story?"

But "what if instead I wrote I was a recovered addict who obtained custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare, and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer?"

Both "are equally true."

Carr's lymphoma is in remission. His 20-year-old daughters — born prematurely, after their mother's cocaine use — are healthy and in college.

Carr says his book's proceeds are paying half their tuitions, part of his motivation to write it.

In it, Carr makes no excuses for his sordid past. He confesses to striking his first wife and at least two girlfriends. He could have tried to explain that, he says, "but to explain is to excuse."

Seven months after his twins were born in 1988, he left them alone in a chilly car while he bought crack. A month later, he went into rehab. His daughters went into foster care. He eventually won custody and slowly put his life and career back together. In 2002, he joined The New York Times, where he's a media columnist.

He says he made no secret of his past and listed his drug rehab stints on his résumé.

Except for an alcohol relapse three years ago, he says, he has been sober.

But after James Frey and other memoirists were debunked, a question lingers: How true is any memoir?

Carr says his "is as true as I could make it."

He interviewed 60 people from his past and found his rehab reports and arrest records. Most of the interviews were videotaped and posted at nightofthegun.com.

The New York Observer crowned Carr the "white knight" of memoirs, "galloping in to show how a personal story can be engrossing, shocking and true."

Carr calls his memoir "less a corrective (to Frey) than me going with what I know" how to do.

When his book won an "A" from Entertainment Weekly, he says his daughter Meagan disagreed. She awarded it a B+, calling the ending too convenient, "with everything tied up in a neat little bow."

Happily remarried, with an 11-year-old daughter and a house in Montclair, N.J., Carr says the ending was a problem: "I am better at chronicling mayhem than I am at describing the remarkable, lucky life that followed."

He says he has "enormous regard for Meagan's opinions — she lived it, so how could I not? — so I will take her grade gratefully and run with it."

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